STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE
attack the very foundations on which the structure is
based.
Freud is himself indirectly to blame. Schism is the
hall-mark of rehgion, and a man who treats scientific
facts as does Freud, in a religious way, must necessarily
expect the tnals and tribulations, as well as the intense
personal relationships, of a religious leader. In approach-
ing science in a religious spirit, I do not mean in a
* reverent' spirit. The scientist necessarily approaches
reality, with all its richness and complexity, with a
feeling of reverence and insignificance which is the
more intense the more materialistic he is, and, the less
he feels that this reality is a mere offshoot or emanation
of a Divine fiiend of his. I mean by a * religious *
approach, the belief that scientific phenomena are ade-
quately explained by any symbolisation which includes
and accounts for the phenomena. Thus * caloric *
accounts for temperature phenomena. None the less,
no such mysterious stuff exists. In the same way Freud
supposes that any fable which includes a connected
statement of genuine psychical phenomena is a scientific
hypothesis, whether or no it exhibits in a causal manner
the inner relations of the phenomena. Of course such
explanations break down because they do not fit into
die causal scheme of science as a whole.
Now this is precisely the way religion sets about
explaining the world, thunder and lightning are caused
by deities. The world exists because it was created by a
God, Disaster is the will of an omnipotent deity, or the
triumph of an evil deity over an omnipotent deity. We
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